With this executable you can perform all manner of ChangeVue tasks such as:

• add and remove projects
• add and remove files
• check files in and out
• get comments and file histories
• label files and projects
• perform wildcard searches and pipe results
• and much more.

The ChangeVue command line executable should be available with the July monthly build release of ChangeVue 2009. Make sure that you download that update to get all of the new ChangeVue command line power!

Technorati Tags: batch, ChangeVue, command line

The single list:

http://waynes-world-it.blogspot.com/2008/09/useful-command-lines.html

The same commands split into categories:

http://waynes-world-it.blogspot.com/2008/09/useful-active-directory-command-line.html

http://waynes-world-it.blogspot.com/2008/09/useful-dns-dhcp-and-wins-command-line.html

http://waynes-world-it.blogspot.com/2008/09/useful-general-command-line-operations.html

http://waynes-world-it.blogspot.com/2008/09/useful-vmware-esx-and-vc-command-line.html

http://waynes-world-it.blogspot.com/2008/09/useful-windows-mscs-cluster-command.html

http://waynes-world-it.blogspot.com/2008/09/useful-windows-printer-command-line.html

http://waynes-world-it.blogspot.com/2008/09/useful-ntfs-and-security-command-line.html

Technorati Tags: Active Directory, cli, Cluster, commandline, DHCP, DNS, DSQuery, NTFS, security, tips, vmware

My Sessions:

Managing Active Directory with Windows PowerShell

Mr. Roboto’s Automation Toolkit

Monitoring Performance, Events and Alerts with Windows PowerShell

Securing Windows PowerShell (with Don Jones)

If you’re attending I hope you’ll stop by and say hello.  At some point I’ll post some material from the show so even if you can’t make it you won’t feel left out.  Although you might feel you’re missing a lot of fun and a great experience after watching this:

Technorati Tags: ADSI, Mr. Roboto, powershell, scripting, Techmentor, VBScript, Windows, wmi

Moscone Center West

April 3). If you’ve never been to a Techmentor conference you’re missing a great opportunity to hear and see your favorite IT speakers. Plus it’s a lot of fun to meet your peers, swap war stories and even some strategy and tips.

Here’s what I have in store for you:

Automating Remote Systems Management with PowerShell v1.0 and WMI

Although PowerShell is an incredibly valuable administrative tool, a major feature is its support for Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). In this session  you’ll learn how to access remote system information, build management reports, monitor WMI events and more all with PowerShell. This will be a demo-rich session with many real-world and practical examples you can take home and use immediately.

Automating Exchange Server 2007 Management

Come see how easy it is to manage your Exchange 2007 servers from the PowerShell console. I’ll guide you through common Exchange management tasks including managing mailboxes, users, contacts, databases and more. You may know how to accomplish these tasks in Exchange 2003 or from the Exchange 2007 management GUI, but the real power is at the console. If you are evaluating Exchange 2007, you’ll be very excited and eager to deploy it when we’re finished. This will be a demo-heavy session with many real-world and practical examples you can take home and use immediately.

Mr. Roboto’s Resource Kit

In this session I’ll open up my bag of tricks and tools for managing Windows servers and desktops. From mass password changes to event log management to security Mr. Roboto will show how to keep on top of your environment with free or low-cost alternatives. You’ll leave with plenty of tools you can begin using immediately to make your job easier and maybe even a little fun.

Logon Scripting Fundamentals

Do you have logon scripts for your users? Do you still need them? Do they do what you want them to do? What good are logon scripts anyway? You’ll learn the best way to leverage logon scripts and integrate them into Group Policy. You’ll also see how to create logon scripts with no scripting required. In fact, no scripting experience is required at all for this session.

Finally, if that’s not enough I’m also doing a half-day post-conference workshop. This is separate from the main conference.

Automating Active Directory Management with Windows PowerShell

You’ve got Active Directory to manage and you have PowerShell. What can you do? It turns out, quite a bit. I will teach you how to use PowerShell to manage Active Directory users, groups and computers. You’ll learn how to manage individual objects as well as bulk creation and management. You’ll learn how easy it is to import a CSV file with 1000 new users and create fully populated accounts in a matter seconds. We’ll explore the ADSI type adapters, the Active Directory PSDrive provider from the PowerShell Community Extensions and the free Quest Active Directory Management Console. This will be a demo-heavy session with many real-world and practical examples you can take home and use immediately. Much of the content will be live demontrations of material from my forthcoming book, Managing Directory Services with Windows PowerShell. You may bring a laptop to follow along, but this is NOT instructor-led training with hands-onlabs. If you come with a laptop, it should have a virtual machine running a
Windows 2003 domain controller. The virtual machine should be running PowerShell v1.0 and the current versions of the PowerShell Community Extensions and the Quest Active Directory Management console.

And this is just what I’m doing.  Check out the full schedule and register today. You won’t be disappointed. I often hear at conferences from attendees that they often learn something or pickup some tip that more than justifies the conference expense. Something that solves a prickly problem and they leave happy and eager. I hope to see you there.

Technorati Tags: Active Directory, Exchange 2007, Mr. Roboto, powershell, Techmentor, VBScript

Examples:

REG QUERY HKLM\Software\Microsoft\ResKit /v Version
Displays the value of the registry value Version

REG QUERY \ABC\HKLM\Software\Microsoft\ResKit\Nt\Setup /s
Displays all subkeys and values under the registry key Setup
on remote machine ABC

REG QUERY HKLM\Software\Microsoft\ResKit\Nt\Setup /se #
Displays all the subkeys and values with “#” as the seperator
for all valuenames whose type is REG_MULTI_SZ.

REG QUERY HKLM /f SYSTEM /t REG_SZ /c /e
Displays Key, Value and Data with case sensitive and exact
occurrences of “SYSTEM” under HKLM root for the data type REG_SZ

REG QUERY HKCU /f 0F /d /t REG_BINARY
Displays Key, Value and Data for the occurrences of “0F” in data
under HKCU root for the data type REG_BINARY

REG QUERY HKLM\SOFTWARE /ve
Displays Value and Data for the empty value (Default)
under HKLM\SOFTWARE

To see the complete help open a command prompt and type REG query /? or REG /? to see all the things this tool can accomplish.

I put together a batch file to streamline the query process. It is also attached as a text file.

@echo off
REM ReqQuery.bat
REM Keywords: Registry,REG,REMote
REM USAGE
REM RegQuery.bat [computername]

::**********NOTES**********
REM This script will the registry for the specified key.
REM The computer name and registry key value will be displayed.
REM You can specify a computername as a runtime parameter.

REM If you don’t specify a name, the script will query
REM the local machine.

REM If you want to save results run
REM RegQueryList.bat > results.txt

REM To process a list of computers use an expression like this:
REM for /f %s in (servers.txt) do @regquery.bat %s >> results.txt

REM If you don’t specify a computer, the local computer will
REM be queried.

::**********CONFIGURATION**********
REM Define the registry path to query. Do not use quotes.
REM Remote computers can query either HKLM or HKCU, although as
REM a practical matter you can really only use HKLM

set regPath=hklm\software\microsoft\windows NT\currentversion

REM Enter the registry key that you want the value of:
set regKey=RegisteredOwner

::**********MAIN SCRIPT**********
if %1$==$ (
set computer=%computername%
) else (
set computer=%1
)

REM uncomment next line for debugging
REM echo Reg Query “\%computer%\%regpath%” /v %regkey%

FOR /F “tokens=*” %%a in (‘Reg Query “\%computer%\%regpath%” /v %regkey% ^|

find /i “%regkey%”’) do @echo %computer% %%a

GOTO :OUT

:OUT
set regPath=
set regKey=
set computer=

:EOF

The script takes a computer name as a run time parameter. If you don’t specify one then the local computer will be queried.

The script is intended to return the value of a single registry key. There are two variables you need to edit in the script before running it. Of course, you may prefer to modify this script so you can pass keys and values as additional run time parameters.

To query a single computer, open a command prompt in your script directory and run something like this:

C:\Scripts>regquery jdhit-dc01
jdhit-dc01 RegisteredOwner REG_SZ Jeffery D. Hicks

As written you’ll need to use traditional console redirection to save the results:

C:\Scripts>regquery jdhit-dc01 > owner.txt

What about a bunch of computers? Easy. Use the FOR command like this:

c:\Scripts\for /f %s in (servers.txt) do @regquery.bat %s >> owners.txt

If owners.txt already exists all output will be appended to it so you might need to delete first if it exists.

There’s no provision for alternate credentials using REG, so you’ll likely need admin rights for the remote computer you are querying.

If you have simple needs, a simple tool like REG will do the trick. Next time we’ll revisit this topic with VBScript and WMI.

Technorati Tags: batch, cli, cmd, command line, reg.exe, registry

You can download the file at the Essentials page on ScriptingAnswers.com. The zip file has material from all of the scripting track sessions, plus the Logon Script Cookbook session which was in Bruce’s track. If you missed the last conference, keep an eye on http://techmentorevents.com/ for information about the next one.

Thank to all of you for support and encouragement. We hope you got a lot out of the conference.  2008 looks to be an equally busy year for conferences so we hope you see you somewhere.

I know in my zip file there are several readme files so make sure you look at them. I’ve included the video demos which will likely require you to install a codec or two.  I’ve included them in the zip file so you don’t have to go hunting for them.

These files won’t be around forever so be sure to download them soon. 

If you missed the conference in Orlando, hopefully you can make arrangements to join us in fabulous Las Vegas Oct. 15-19, 2007.

First, if you’ve never used WMIC, open a command prompt and type: WMIC

You should get a  brief installation message followed by a WMIC prompt.  You can type exit to return to the command prompt. WMIC has an interactive mode like NSLOOKUP or you can access it directly from the command line.

Today I’ll give you an expression to return the current operating system and service pack on a given computer.

First, run this command to see your local system:

C:\> wmic os get caption,csdversion | find /i /v “Caption”

This will return something like:

Microsoft Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2

To check a remote system use a command like this:

C:\> wmic /node:”JDH-DC01” os get caption,csdversion | find /i /v “Caption”

If the computer name has a dash in the name, enclose it in “” as I did here. Since we’re talking about WMI, what about alternate credentials:

C:\> wmic /node:”JDH-DC01” /user:domain\admin /password:MyP@$$ os get caption,csdversion | find /i /v “Caption”

If the password has any special characters be sure to enclose it in quotes.

Finally, if you want to check several machines, you can either specify the computer names like this:

C:\> wmic /node:”jdh-dc01”,godot,dogtoy os get csname,caption,csdversion | find /i /v “Caption”

Or tell WMIC to use a text file of computernames:

C:\> wmic /node:@servers.txt os get csname,caption,csdversion | find /i /v “Caption”

I’ve added the CSNAME property so you get the computername as well. Otherwise, you might not be able to tell what OS goes with which computer.

That’s all for now.  I’ve just scratched the surface here. What do you think? Can you incorporate any of this into your batch files?  What would like to be able to do with this?

As I’ve explained before, menu choices by default are case-insensitive. However, you can enforce a case-sensitive choice with the /CS switch:

@echo off
echo a = Lower Case choice
echo A = Upper case choice
Choice /c “aA” /CS /M “Make a choice”

if errorlevel 2 GOTO :Upper
if errorlevel 1 GOTO :Lower
GOTO :EOF

:Upper
echo Upper Case choice
GOTO :EOF

:Lower
echo Lower Case choice
GOTO :EOF

:EOF

The user’s choices are “a” or “A”. Again, the script jumps to the appropriate section depending on what was selected.

There may be times in your batch file where you want to provide a menu choice, but don’t want to wait indefinitely. For those situations you will use a combination of /T to specify a timeout value in seconds between 0 and 9999, and /D to indicate the default value. The /D value must be one of the options listed with /C.

@echo off
Choice /T 5 /D Y /M “Do you want to continue?”

if errorlevel 2 GOTO :NO
if errorlevel 1 GOTO :YES
GOTO :EOF

:NO
echo Not continuing
GOTO :EOF

:YES
echo Continuing
GOTO :EOF

:EOF

This prompt will wait for 5 seconds for the user to make a choice. If they don’t respond by then, the script will force the default choice of Y which will evaulated just as if the user had typed Y at the choice prompt.
By now you should have enough information and samples on how to incorporate CHOICE into your batch files. If you ever forget the options, simpy run CHOICE /? at a command prompt for syntax help.

@AdminMenu.bat
GOTO :MENU
:MENU

cls
echo Admin Menu
echo 1 – Create User
echo 2 – Create Group
echo 3 – Create Computer
echo 4 – Quit
Choice /C 1234 /M “Enter a menu selection”

if errorlevel 4 GOTO :EOF
if errorlevel 3 GOTO :COMPUTER
if errorlevel 2 GOTO :GROUP
if errorlevel 1 GOTO :USER
GOTO :EOF

:USER
ECHO Create New user

PAUSE
goto :MENU

:GROUP
ECHO Create New Group

PAUSE
goto :MENU

:COMPUTER

ECHO Create New computer

PAUSE
goto :MENU

:EOF

I’m echoing a menu to the screen and then using CHOICE to prompt the user to make a menu selection. The /C switch lets met specify the choice options and /M will be the message prompt. When run, the user should see something like this:

Admin Menu
1 – Create User
2 – Create Group
3 – Create Computer
4 – Quit
Enter a menu selection [1,2,3,4]?

The cursor will wait at the prompt until the user makes a selection of 1,2,3 or 4. Any other selection will cause the computer to complain with a beep. The only other way to abort is to press Ctrl-C and break out of the script so you should always give the user an option to gracefully exit your script.

As I discussed last time, the selected option will correspond to an Errorlevel value so all I have to do is jump to the right section of the script:

if errorlevel 4 GOTO :EOF
if errorlevel 3 GOTO :COMPUTER
if errorlevel 2 GOTO :GROUP
if errorlevel 1 GOTO :USER
GOTO :EOF

I probably don’t need the last GOTO :EOF statement since the user can only enter the choices I’ve made or CHOICE will beep and not move on. Still, I like including this to cover the unexpected so that the script will gracefully exit. It doesn’t cost me anything to keep it in.

Within each section, I just have placeholder code to indicate what each section will do. The Pause command waits for the user to press any key, and then script execution returns to the main menu.

:COMPUTER
ECHO Create New computer

PAUSE
goto :MENU

I’ve got one more entry on this topic so stay tuned.